📚 Book review: "API Design for C++" (2011)

Link to Amazon.

The teamlead of a neighboring team recommended me this book. He absolutely loved it 🤩 But I had controversial impressions 🤔

What is an API? The book says:

An API is a logical interface to a software component that hides the internal details required to implement it.

We are surrounded by different APIs, even a single program has multiple APIs. The book explores questions related to API design in C++.

The book quite clearly separates “general principles of API design” and “specific issues of API design in C++”.

The first component, as the philosophical one, is indeed very nice – there are a lot of sensible ideas, hints, as well as examples of the API of popular projects. The book helps you understand what issues a software architect is thinking about so that the API does not become non-usable in a few weeks 👍

The second component, as the technical one, in my opinion, is weak. Here are some of the cons that I didn’t like:

• The book was published in 2011, it describes features of C++0x (the working title of C++11) of an ancient version. The auto keyword is nowhere used in the book, they write std::vector<double>::iterator by hand, and so on.
• Some paragraphs are written by Captain Oblivious, for example Avoid #define for constants.
• Very little said about ABI compatibility, exactly one page with trivial information. Without mentioning tools like abidiff and specific recommendations.
• Static and dynamic libraries are described only in the last 10 pages of the 450-pages long book, also with trivial information.